The Delilah Complex (4 page)

I
was sitting in the makeup room of the
Today
show on that Friday morning in early October, nursing a cup of strong black coffee while a young woman stroked my face with a wet sponge, adding a warm tone to my pale skin. It was seven-thirty and I still had to have my hair done. I wasn’t due on the set for another forty minutes, but that wasn’t why I was nervous.

Even though I knew the topic we’d be discussing, I didn’t know exactly what the questions were going to be. Whatever I wanted to impart to the public about when to see a sex therapist and why, I’d have to do it in less than five minutes.

I drank more of the coffee and stared into the mirror, watching the makeup artist work her magic on my face.

No matter how well you understand how fear works, how adrenaline flows into your bloodstream and how it makes you feel, it’s still unnerving to know you are going to be on national television, and that your face and voice and words are going to be seen and heard by more than eight million people.

I would have rather been almost anywhere else, but I
was there for one of those eight million people: a thirteenyear-old girl who was sitting glued to a TV screen at her father’s apartment, waiting to see her mother on television.

Daily, Dulcie had been asking me about nervous reactions. While the debut of the Broadway production was months away, there was a preview in a few weeks, in Boston. We talked about stage fright often, from the chemicals your body releases when you are in a situation that gives you the jitters to dry mouth, and various remedies like slow, steady breathing. Dulcie needed me to show her that, with no training and no desire to be onstage, I could do it. “If you can when you don’t even want to, then I can do it, too. After all, Mom, I’m the one with the passion for an audience.”

The makeup artist told me to close my eyes, and I felt a brush follow the line of my eyelid.

My mother had gone through this every day. It was part of what had seduced her. Acting. Accolades. Attention. Applause. Starting when she was sixteen, she co-starred in a popular TV series.
The Lost Girls
was a drama about two orphaned teenagers who were taken in by a married couple—both professors at an Ivy League school in Boston.

The girls always got into terrible trouble until one of them—either my mother or her co-star, Debi Carey— would solve the problem and save the day. Meanwhile, the charming but clueless elderly couple never guessed how close the girls had come to danger, and sometimes death.

When the show went off the air after three years, my mother’s career stumbled. She turned first to marriage and motherhood, and when neither satisfied the ache from missing the limelight and she failed to land another substantial role, she turned to drugs and alcohol and affairs to fill the emptiness.

My mother died of an overdose when I was only eight. Her star had lit up early and then burnt out too fast: her greatest legacy being the damage she did to her loved ones.

Where are you going? When are you coming back?
I used to ask her when she went out smelling of roses, lemon and lavender, dressed up in her high heels and short skirts. She was so beautiful, no matter how sad and sick she was. She was one of
the lost girls
even if she was a woman with a child.

A lost girl
.

Not the first one I had tried to save.

Not the last one I would fail.

Now I was faced with her granddaughter’s stage lust. History was not going to repeat itself. I was going to keep Dulcie grounded even if her star lifted off and shot her out into the stratosphere.

The makeup artist added a final stroke of blush, brushed on more mascara and finished up with an apricot-colored lipstick. I was soothed by the sensations of the sable and the soft powders. Another woman combed out my hair and sprayed it in place.

In the mirror I saw a small woman, coiffed and made up, who only resembled me. A doppelgänger, more sophisticated and embellished than I ever was.

Done, I was escorted to the greenroom, where a halfdozen people milled around, nibbling on the elaborate array of fruits, cheeses and breakfast bakery goods. I refilled my coffee.

The producer came in to get the next guest—a willowy novelist named Lisa Tucker—and checked on the rest of us, asking if we needed anything.

I watched the show on the monitor for a few minutes, and when the screen went to commercials I picked up the
newspaper that the novelist had left on her seat. Unfolding it, I scanned the front page.

There was a photo of a politician who’d made a speech at the UN, another photo of a sports figure who’d broken a world record, and a shot of the destruction left behind after a freak storm had hit New Jersey. But it was a small shot of the soles of a man’s feet, with the number 1 written on them, that drew my eye. The headline read: Financier Assumed Dead.

Even before I started to read the story, three words popped from among all the black-and-white type. A name in the last paragraph of the article. The name of a man. Detective Noah Jordain.

I sighed and read past the headline.

      Philip Maur, 41, the youngest chairman in the history of Grimly and Maur,the prestigious Wall Street investment firm, is assumed to be dead after a series of photographs of his body were delivered to the offices of this paper yesterday morning.

               Maur’s wife, Cyn Maur, said that her husband had been missing for five days. “He went to work on Friday morning and told me that he’d be home late because he was going to be attending a dinner meeting.”

               Maur was in his office all day Friday and left at 6:00 p.m. His secretary said he did not tell her where he was going and had not asked her to make any reservations for him that evening, which was not unusual.

               Cyn Maur contacted the police on Saturday morning after not hearing from her husband all
night. She’d tried his cell phone repeatedly but he had not answered, which she said was not like him. “He’s a very responsible father and husband. He’s never out of reach for more than an hour or two. Our daughter has juvenile diabetes and Philip is devoted to her. He’d never just go away without telling me. He’s never stayed out all night before. I knew something was wrong.”

               A missing-persons report was filed at eight-thirty Saturday morning. There was still no information as to Maur’s whereabouts on Tuesday morning, when the photographs were received by the New YorkTimes. The photograph shown above and two others, which are now in police custody, were not accompanied by a note. There was no information alluding to the whereabouts of Maur’s body.

               “I don’t have any comment at this time except to ask anyone who might have seen Philip Maur on Friday evening, or at any time since then, to contact our office,”said Detective Noah Jordain of the city’s Special Victims Unit.

               The fact that Jordain is heading the investigation implies that there is a sexual component to the murder. The graphic photographs this paper received reinforce that suggestion.

               The police have requested that we not print all of the photographs, due to the ongoing investigation.

My pulse was racing. My hands felt clammy and I cleared my throat. Seeing Jordain’s name on the page had done that to me. I tried to slow down my heartbeat by concentrating, but the name had been like an electrical shock.

I hadn’t known I was still that susceptible. It was silly. But it was the truth.

It had been four months since I’d seen him. Four months since I’d stood him up and then called him—when I’d known he wouldn’t be home—and left a message on his answering machine, apologizing and explaining that it was just too soon after my divorce for me to think about dating anyone.

That had been a lie.

It had not been too soon.

I was scared of the detective and what I felt when I was with him.

Noah Jordain had walked into my office one afternoon and my heart had skipped a beat. His searching blue eyes had looked right into my dark brown ones and he’d dared me to look away. A police trick, I’d thought. Did he even know he was doing it? I dared him to look away first. A therapist’s trick. He didn’t. We were evenly matched. He held out his hand and I shook it, aware of it being large, pleasantly dry, but not too rough. I could tell he had enormous strength in his fingers but that he was aware of it and was being careful. And then the impact of him hit me. Like a blast of steam. For a minute nothing mattered and I lost my bearings. This had not happened to me with anyone I’d ever met, and it shook me to my core. I know better than to attribute instant attraction to anything but past psychological association—someone who looks like someone else whom you liked a lot—or a hormonal, pheromone, chemical reaction between two mammals.

It hadn’t been that simple for us.

Faster than seemed possible, better than any shrink could have, he’d psyched me out and gotten under my
skin. And that scared me. I don’t like things I can’t put a name to, or explain by some science or therapeutic logic. We might have been good together but, more likely, I think we would have destroyed each other. Neither of us was willing to keep from going too deep into the other’s psyche. It all happened too fast and…I ran.

After that I’d promptly forgotten about him.

So seeing his name that morning in the greenroom, I was surprised at my reaction. Obviously, he’d made a stronger impression than I’d thought.

Bullshit.

I’d known exactly how strong an impression he’d made. That was why I’d run. He was overpowering. Sure of himself. A little arrogant, but kind. Caring. And. And. And. Sexually powerful. Jordain made me think about getting naked, about skin on skin, about lips locking. I looked at him and remembered his lips on mine, on my breasts, pulling on my nipples, nuzzling between my legs. I leaned into him, smelled him, and couldn’t think of anything but putting my hands under his shirt, undressing him and doing whatever he wanted me to do. I wanted to surrender to that power. To let it take me over and see where it would lead. I had never thought about those things before I’d slept with him.

I had heard them from patients. I had dreamed them. I had even been thankful I did not feel that with my husband. It was too absorbing. I didn’t want to surrender to any emotion, to any passion. Ever.

Jordain had too much intuition about me. About what I thought. About how to touch me. About how to make my body curve to his. About how to blow on the spot where my neck met my collarbone with breath so hot I had to close my eyes and hold on to his arms with tightened fingers.

He would have weakened me.

And that was not the worst he could have done.

A flush of heat warmed the back of my neck. My celery silk shirt was suddenly sticking to my back and my olive gabardine jacket felt as if it was a whole size too small.

Turning from the paper, I took another sip of the coffee, which by then was lukewarm. And another. I looked down at the ring on my right hand—a butterfly made of white gold, paved with tsarvorite in the wings and just a few tiny diamond chips in the body. It had been a birthday gift from my daughter and her godmother—my surrogate mother, Nina. I touched the tips of the wings, which were almost, but not quite, sharp enough to hurt. They had surprised me with the present just days after the Magdalene Murderer had been apprehended.

Just days after I’d almost been killed, along with one of my patients.

Just days after the last time I spoke to Detective Jordain.

“Dr. Snow? You’ll be on as soon as this news break is over. Would you come with me, please?”

The air was freezing in studio 1A and I shivered as we walked down the hall, aware that I was cold over a layer of heat that was, like a memory, holding its own beneath the surface of my skin.

This was the last thing I needed to think about minutes before the camera focused on me.

“Do you need anything before you go on?” she asked.

“No, I’m fine.”

But that wasn’t true.

“I’
m not here to talk about going into therapy myself. I’m here on behalf of a group of women who would like you to conduct private group therapy sessions for them,” Shelby Rush said.

More than twenty-five phone calls had come in on Friday afternoon, following my appearance on the
Today
show. The receptionist at the Butterfield Institute, where I practiced, said that all but one had asked what kind of health insurance I accepted and what my rates were. Five of them had said they would call back to schedule appointments after they checked with their insurance agents. I wasn’t planning on taking on all of them as patients. My schedule was already tight. But I’d meet them and evaluate them so that I could refer them to the right therapist at the institute.

One woman had asked for an appointment without inquiring about either my rates or the insurance, and now she sat opposite me in my pale yellow office, on the other side of my desk. Shelby was in her mid-thirties, attractive and articulate in a way that many women in Manhattan are. Her expensive clothes were unremarkable. Taupe slacks, white
silk shell and black blazer. High-heeled Chanel shoes and a Gucci handbag—taupe fabric with interlocking Gs.

I dressed pretty much the way she did—but less expensively. The look was the same though: classic, tailored, chic. The New York City uniform for women over thirty. Not an expression of individuality so much as a way to win the fashion war that most of us were tired of once we left our twenties.

You can’t read us by these clothes. Our shoes and bags, our suits, shirts and slacks all mean nothing. Our secret souls aren’t exposed by the name on the label inside our jackets. They are not even visible on our faces.

Some therapists claim that they can get a glimpse of their patients’ real selves in their eyes, but I wasn’t sure of that anymore. Maybe it was because so many of the successful business professionals I worked with had learned the art of concealment and false impressions for work. Maybe it was because my talents lay more in getting people to open up, because they trusted I wouldn’t judge them. I don’t believe in popular psychology or fast fixes.

“What kind of organization do you belong to, Shelby? Why do you think I’d be the right therapist?”

She uncrossed her hands and looked down at her nails as if she’d find the answer to my question cribbed on the pale pink ovals.

I took her emotional temperature. She didn’t fidget, but she bit her bottom lip and held the skin between her teeth so long it seemed as if the action was actually preventing her from speaking.

“Shelby?”

“This is a little complicated, Dr. Snow.”

I nodded, encouraging her. She bit her lip again. I could wait as long as it took her to decide she was ready to tell
me. I glanced at the two high arched windows on the south wall of my office. Beyond them was a three-foot-wide ledge—which, in Manhattan, many would call a terrace. It was only big enough to stand on and look down at the sidewalk or up at the sky, but I’d crammed the space with planters containing flowers and bushes that attracted butterflies.

When I’d first created my city garden, everyone told me I was dreaming, that there were no butterflies in the city apart from those in the butterfly exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.

But I knew there were masses of monarchs in Central Park. They settled on flowers in the Shakespeare Garden, in the Conservatory and in the Rambles. And since the Butterfield Institute was only a block and a half from the park, I thought they might come.

The first year they didn’t, but they showed up the second and have been coming ever since. Lovely red-orange monarchs, cabbage whites and pop-art zebra swallowtails find their way to my small garden and grace me with their short-lived loveliness. Winged creatures that exist to reproduce and, in the process, help flowers to do the same.

By late September the butterflies were usually gone, but this year it was still so warm that they had not yet started their migration. A monarch, as deeply orange as the leaves on the maple trees, flitted from petal to petal while Shelby struggled to figure out how to reveal her secrets.

Aristotle had named butterflies
psyche
, the Greek word for
soul
, and I understood why. Their metamorphosis reminded me of the way patients work so hard to become free of what has kept them fettered in the past.

Finally, Shelby let go of her lip and began. “Our society—we call it a society, the Scarlet Society—is a secret.
Sounds so melodramatic, doesn’t it? But it is. No one outside of the membership knows about it. We don’t do anything illegal. Or dangerous. But it has lasted, in one form or another, for the past forty years without anyone finding out about it except the people we wanted to know.”

I did the math. The society had formed in the early sixties.

Shelby had stopped talking and was biting her lip again.

“Can you tell me any more than that?”

“Yes. Of course. Our membership is made up of single, married and divorced women, many of whom work for a living. Everyone is fairly well off. Our dues are high.”

She stopped. I waited. She didn’t offer anything else.

“That doesn’t really help me all that much. Is there more?”

“Yes, much more. But first we need to reach some kind of agreement, and I’m not really sure how to proceed here. We’ve been so careful. Our members don’t even know one another’s last names. You are the only one who knows mine. Can you agree to help us? Then I can tell you more of what you need to know.”

“I can’t do that until I know what you need and why.”

Shelby frowned and looked back down at her hands.

“Okay. How about this? We are a group of women who have similar interests. Nothing we do is dangerous. Or illegal.”

It was the second time she’d made those two points. So I knew one thing: what they did was in some way dangerous. And possibly illegal.

We all lie. We learn when we are small children and see an overweight woman in the pool and cry out—
Mommy, look, there’s a fat lady
—and our mothers tell us that isn’t nice, that we shouldn’t say things that can hurt people’s
feelings. Because in some cases it’s kinder to lie, we are taught to ingest moral cyanide in the name of civility. And then one day we get to a point in our lives—perhaps the point that Shelby Rush was at that moment—when the truth is the only way we can begin to help and heal, but still we obfuscate and hide because it is what we are used to doing.

“Okay, if you can’t tell me any more about the society, tell me why you think I’m the right therapist for you.”

“Because you’re a sex therapist.”

I nodded but was frustrated and Shelby knew it. “I could explain it all if you would just agree to work with us.”

I leaned forward. “Shelby, here at the institute, we make a serious effort in matching therapists to patients. We’re professionals. I can’t just assume that I’m the right therapist for your group.”

“Almost everyone agreed that you’d be right.”

“Who didn’t agree?”

“One of our members who doesn’t think we need a therapist at all. Another who wanted us to hire her therapist, but I didn’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Why me?”

“A friend of mine who isn’t in our society recommended you. She was a patient of yours four years ago. Ellen Kenneth?”

I nodded. Shelby continued. “She told me you are non-judgmental and that you will listen to us talk about sex and the things we do sexually and that you won’t tell us we should stop or warn us that we’re all screwing up our relationships. That you will understand when we tell you we aren’t, that we’re keeping our relationships alive.”

I felt the first stirrings of excitement that usually kick
in at the start of a good therapy session. “What is it a therapist would be judgmental about?”

Shelby sat up straighter, smoothed her pants and flicked her hair behind her shoulders. She was preparing for battle. “What do you think normal sex is, Dr. Snow?”

“I don’t qualify sex as normal or abnormal. Each of us has boundaries. What might be acceptable for you, might not be for someone else. Not because the act itself is acceptable or unacceptable, but rather because of your own reaction to it.”

“Isn’t there anything you think is abnormal?”

“Are you asking me where I draw the line between what is healthy and unhealthy?”

She nodded.

“When your own sexual desires or actions cause serious pain or danger to either yourself or someone else.”

Shelby sat silently, nodding, it seemed, to herself. “We need a therapist who is trustworthy. I know every therapist is supposed to be, but we need to find someone who has been tested. And we know you have been. I did some research on the Magdalene Murders. You never betrayed your patient. You never told the police what you knew.”

I nodded in acknowledgment. Shelby continued.

“We need a therapist who will understand what it is like to be a successful woman making her way in a world that is still male dominated. Who won’t be shocked or disturbed by what we have to say. And we want it to be a sex therapist, not because we need help with sexual issues but because the sexual component of our society is so intrinsic to it that we don’t think anyone else would be able to understand what we have to explain.”

Shelby had told me she was a divorce lawyer, and while I found most of her conversation devoid of legalese, this last speech was too convoluted for me. I wondered if she
had done that to confuse me or was really having a hard time coming out and telling me about the Scarlet Society?

“On the
Today
show you talked about how, as women become empowered and gain more recognition and prominence in the work force, their success becomes sexualized, and how that is creating a sexual crisis in many relationships today.”

I nodded again. This was also the basis of the paper Nina had asked me to deliver at the psychiatric conference next August. I waited to hear what connection this thesis had with the society.

“Our club is built on the idea that being sexually aggressive is not alien to women but something we’ve been taught to suppress in order to protect the male position. Male-dominated institutions, businesses, religions and philosophies have perpetuated the myth of the powerless woman. But there are women who want something else. Who don’t want to be dominated. Who don’t want to be chosen. Who don’t get off on any of that.”

I leaned forward. She smiled, knowing she had me. I knew it, too, but that was okay.

“Dr. Snow, our chapter here in New York is having a problem, and we don’t know how we should handle it. I’m afraid…a lot of us are afraid that if we don’t do exactly the right thing now it might rip us apart or threaten what we have. And that would be awful because women have a right to exercise their free will. Not just in the marketplace. Not just by being single parents. Not just reproductively. But we have a right to our own sexual free will. We have a right to be stronger women and enjoy men on our own terms if that’s what pleases us.”

“What are you afraid of?” I asked Shelby.

“We’re afraid for our lives.”